Brownstoner in Berlin: Part 1
We landed in Berlin this morning at 8 a.m. and, since we couldn’t check into our hotel until noon, went straight to our friends’ apartment in Mitte off Prenzlauer Allee. It’s in a traditional six-story stucco-style building with wide floor planks and beautiful plaster ceiling moldings. The place has six large rooms off a central…
We landed in Berlin this morning at 8 a.m. and, since we couldn’t check into our hotel until noon, went straight to our friends’ apartment in Mitte off Prenzlauer Allee. It’s in a traditional six-story stucco-style building with wide floor planks and beautiful plaster ceiling moldings. The place has six large rooms off a central hallway with ten-foot ceilings for a total of, we’d guess, about 1,200 square feet. The rent? 675 euros. We’d appreciate recommendations for neighborhoods for us to explore over the next couple of days. Ideas? GMAP
It’s unoccupied bucause it is uninviting.
I lived in Berlin for 3 years. There are so many apartments, and the rent is so cheap that it kind of doesn’t make sense to buy. There is not a huge ecomony there (try frankfurt or hamburg for that). Its a lot of students, punks and partying ex-pats. Germans who want to make money move somewhere else. Many live in Berlin just for their wild years and then move on.
That said, its not a little village and Germany has one of the largest economies in Europe. The gloom factor comes from comparing it to the ecomonic miracle up through the 80s.
The question is always: will the RE market go up and when ? Way too many open properties. Apts go unrented for months, some for years. Brokers look desperate and they don’t make much money. Prime neighborhoods are going up slowly, but Berlin is geographically huge and has only 3-4 million people. The hipster neighborhoods are a very very small sector, so while Freidrichshain gets overrun by lame restaraunts, there is still Lichtenberg next door for the hipsters to move to.
for your vacation ? go to Panorama 🙂 don’t arrive before 5am.
Bomb Berlin and finish it off for gut!
Berlin rocks…great place for artists, especially ones who actually make a little money. if you are earning 20,000 a year, doesn’t matter where your market is, you can live well there. Try doing that in NYC.
Check out KREUZBERG for SUre!! that was Hipsterville in the 90’s and still had buildings bombed out from 1945…lots of cool Turkish places…very interesting where the wall used to stand.
I LOVE Berlin! Went there this past fall.. stayed in Mitte as well with some friends. The art scene is fantastic and the overall vibe is NYC circa 1980 without the crime. I would move there if I could…
Gee, if you hadn’t posted that you were in Berlin, those photos could pass for a 2BR brownstone coop on Carroll Street.
Mr. B has a sickness many of us share. Having been through a reno or some other kind of Brooklyn RE trauma (or worse, for some, being in the business as a realtor, GC, architect, plumber, etc.) it is hard to look at the world the same way. I was just in Atlanta and I couldn’t stop puzzling over things like why the brickwork on some of the new houses there looks so much better than here, or whether I liked how the wood or hardiplank siding met the corner pieces. Once you’ve been through it, this stuff sticks in your head like AM radio songs from when you were eight. Mr. B is doing the only sane thing by trying to make a living off his sickness. The rest of us are stuck reading and commenting for free.
So go ahead, Mr. B, enjoy your trip, spend a few minutes on art or music or food just to preserve the rpetense of sanity. The rest of us are salivating at the thought of more pictures of Berlin architecture.
talk about not being able to take a vacation. brownstoner just changes locations but is still working.
I remember they had Great Flaffel from the street carts. Kreuzberg was nice. For history check out “check point Charlie”, That was the gate between the East & west. Try some Bubweiser which has nothing to do woth the US Budweiser. Cheers !